Illustrations, captions and links have been added to Professor Hewitt's review. Click on the illustrations to see larger versions of them, and in some cases for more information about them. — JB
his is a fascinating, thought-provoking book, which addresses some of the enduring issues of Victorian serial publishing, embracing patterns of publication, authorship and reading. It works hard to provide a sound platform of both statistical evidence and technological and institutional narrative for the nineteenth century periodical press ‘revolution’ of its title. Not least in its use of the writings of the journalist Eneas Sweetland Dallas (1827-1879) as a starting point, it provides fresh explorations of questions as varied as the role of newspaper correspondence columns, the professionalisation of authorship, and the role of the press in the constitution of the public sphere. How far it succeeds in its aims, or in reaching any conclusions about such questions, is open to debate.
Readers might be misled by the subtitle into thinking this is a book about Dallas himself. It is not, and this is a shame, because Dallas is an intriguing figure, worthy of the attention that Law and his collaborator Jenny Bourne Taylor have recently bestowed on him in their E.S. Dallas in the Times (Routledge, 2024), and the open access edition of Dallas’s The Gay Science (1866; see bibliography). Emerging out of the campaigns against the taxes on knowledge in the early-1850s, by 1856 Dallas had secured a place on the staff of the paper which had been most implacably opposed to those reforms, The Times. His book publishing was limited. But after ‘enrolling himself as a member of that vast army of writers vaguely described as “contributors to the press”’ (as his obituary in the Athenaeum put it), even though (perhaps because?) he was something of a promiscuous rogue, and despite the anonymity of most of his journalism, he was able to establish himself as a recognised and well-regarded presence in London literary circles. He was a friend of G.A. Sala and Edmund Yates, and associate of Dickens, and ultimately for 18 months in 1868 and 1869 editor for Bradbury and Evans of Once a Week. Dallas’s stint as editor does not appear to have been commercially successful, and after losing his position when the journal was sold in mid-1869, and after a brief period as special correspondent for the Times and the Daily News in Paris in 1870-71, his journalistic work seems to have dwindled, and his personal circumstances worsened steadily in the years leading up to his death in 1879.
Left: Cover of Once a Week for 22 October 1859. Right: The first page of Dallas's "Popular Literature — The Periodical" in Blackwood's for January 1859 (pp.96-112), from the HathiTrust website.
There is clearly more to be said about what such a career can tell us concerning journalistic practice in the middle-third of the Victorian period, but that is not attempted here, leaving Dallas the person as a strangely ghostly presence. Readers are supplied with a summary of his outputs, but otherwise Dallas is deployed almost entirely through a selection of his writings on the contemporary press and publishing. That said, Dallas’s essays, and in particular a series on ‘Popular Literature’ in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1859, and essays on ‘The Profession of Literature’ and ‘Provincial Journalism’ in Once a Week in 1868, are a fruitful point of departure for the topics Law seeks to explore, especially the suggestion in his Blackwood’s article that recent developments in serial publication had the ‘potency of a revolution’, if indeed they did not amount already to a revolutionary change. Although Law teases out an extensive body of Dallas’s more particular arguments, it is this claim that provides the over-arching theme of the book. Was there a nineteenth century periodical press ‘revolution’? If so, of what did it comprise, and when and why did it occur?
These questions are addressed in eight chapters grouped in three sections. Usefully for e-readers or those provided with reproductions of a single chapter, each has not only separate endnotes, but also its own bibliographic material. The first two chapters are preliminary, introducing Dallas and his arguments about Victorian periodicals, and then offering a ‘literature review’. The latter describes the key Victorian positions on journalism in the context of which Dallas wrote, and subsequent debates between (amongst others) McLuhan and Habermas over the relative impact of technological and cultural factors in the evolution of the periodical press. It then supplies a brief survey of recent histories of the press in which Dallas has received some sort of notice (an exercise which usefully draws attention to just how often Dallas has been cited by scholars in this area). Law makes clear that de Tocqueville’s ideas of the role of the press in constituting civil society were a key influence, and that he himself operates in the book within a similar Habermasian frame.
The second section, ‘Quantitative analysis’, constitute chapters 2 and 3, ‘Periodical growth over the century’, and ‘Changing periodical distribution’. The first charts arithmetically the nineteenth century transformation of the press from small high-cost circulation to broad mass-market sales. Stamp returns, press directories and newspaper histories are used to quantify what at least in outline is the well-recognised (and regionally uneven) explosion of periodical publication between 1800 and 1900. The second looks both at changing technologies and techniques of production and circulation, including pulp-paper, stereotyping, steam-roller printing, and railway distribution, and the ways in which these created new demographies of dissemination and consumption.
The Printing Office of Emily Faithful's Victoria Press, where, for example, the monthly Englishwoman's Journal was printed.
These chapters illustrate some of Law’s difficulties. The focus on Dallas implies at times a specific attention to the years around 1860 when the final fiscal constraints on the press were removed, and out of whose particular circumstances Dallas’s essays clearly emerged. Much of the material presented speaks to a mid-Victorian media revolution. The aggregate picture of a very rapid increase of stamped circulation in the mid-1830s (albeit with marked regional and generic diversities), and then renewed upturn in the early 1850s sustained until an Edwardian plateau, are clearly established. In this sense Law can endorse Dallas’s own optimism about the developments he was living through. But there is also a parallel frame which conceives of the Victorian revolution as a much more gradual affair, arising out of earlier technological innovations, legal changes, and transformations in the economics and institutions of news gathering and distribution, and operating across the Victorian period as a whole. (And in which the triumphant liberal culture and the sound public opinion that it fed, which Dallas heralded in the 1860s, were ultimately swamped by a mass market consumerist newspaper culture.)
Of course, and especially in respect of the mid-Victorian transition, Law is hampered by the radically different nature of the information he can draw upon for the pre- and post-1855 periods. But his organisation is also not always helpful in teasing out the significance of the years of Dallas’s own career, and especially of the writings on which Law predominantly draws. The numerical consequences of the reforms of the 1850s and the generic innovations they heralded (such as the rise of the penny news miscellany) are apparent in the data in chapter 3, but the summary of the nature of the campaigns is held over until chapter 4. This prevents any sustained consideration of the impact of one on the other or its implications, and means that many of the more detailed considerations of the nature and cultural work of the periodical press emerge later, when the frame of the discussion has shifted to the wider picture of ‘rapid growth in the production, distribution and consumption’ of all forms of periodicals across the century (80). As a result, issues such as the shift from communal to private reading are somewhat marginalised, and the particular significance of the repeal of the taxes on knowledge obscured.
Law is too sophisticated a historian to be content with purely quantitative approaches, and the third section, ‘Qualitative Analysis’, seeks to broaden out the analysis via three substantive chapters on periodical authorship, publishing and readership. These attend more to practices and functions than numbers. The discussion of authorship takes its departure from Dallas’s view that authorial anonymity ensured that the press was aligned to groups rather than becoming the mouthpiece of individuals, and also that rapidly expanding opportunities for writing meant that authorship was becoming deprofessionalised, ‘fast ceasing to be a peculiar profession’ (91). Law traces the extent to which professionalisation – especially institutional professionalisation – came late across all forms of authorship in Britain, in partial contrast (as he notes) with France, and census designations remained unstable. But Law also observes that, notwithstanding this, authors became increasingly individuated and visible as the century progressed. Of course, this is one area which raises acutely questions about the usefulness of the framing conceptualisation of the ‘periodical press’. As Law’s discussion shows, here periodicals and newspapers demonstrated quite divergent histories. For the periodical, signed authorship was normalised – albeit not universal – from the 1860s onwards, in a way that wasn’t the case for newspapers before the Edwardian period, except perhaps for the editors themselves.
The subsequent chapter on publishing assesses the validity of Dallas’s arguments that mid-century developments involved a ‘trend away from knowledge monopoly towards liberal diversity’ (116), and that the commercial basis of the press offered the best guarantee of its efficiency and integrity. Law suggests (along the lines of the long-established critique of Curran et al.) that patterns of ownership give the lie to Dallas’s optimism, with a slide towards agglomeration of titles, the monopolization of news, and an inevitable attenuation of the press’s ‘civic functions’. Somewhat unsatisfactorily, it is only in Chapter 7 that Law attends to the role of readers’ correspondence in the press. Here at last he examines Dallas’s claims that journal readership was an active not passive activity, a form of voluntary association, and, secondly, that periodical literature functioned dialectically not merely as index, but also as the creator, of public opinion.
Woman Reading a Newspaper, by Norman Garstin (1891).
This chapter focuses almost exclusively on the question of readers as active citizens, and in this context the material on letter writing, though very much preliminary, is welcome and interesting. But the discussion only reinforces the lamentable neglect of the role of readers’ correspondence by historians of the press, something to which Aled Jones drew attention more than 30 years ago. Much more might also have been said about the continued role of the press itself both as a scrutineer of the public sphere, and as an instrument for the mobilisation of extra-parliamentary pressure. It is notable that, passing reference to the Chartist press aside, Law’s discussion by-passes campaigning periodicals that overtly sought to mould and embody ‘public opinion’, in favour of various ‘class’ titles, including trade papers, and transactions of learned societies, which undoubtedly served communities, but often in more passive ways. All this reminds us of the sheer scale and diversity of the Victorian ‘periodical press’, and the enormous challenges faced by anyone who attempts to propose a general history.
Inevitably in a book as brief yet broad-ranging as this, Law’s formulations occasionally invite challenge. For example, given the widespread evidence of various forms of shared and collective readership, it does not seem to make sense, except in narrow terms of personal purchase, to suggest that at the start of the nineteenth century ‘most British periodicals were luxuries available only to the wealthy’ (41). Likewise, while it may technically be accurate to say that the Daily Mail was the first daily paper to be owned by a ‘public company’, it is questionable how useful this designation is, if it effaces the longstanding history of joint stock financing, stretching back at least to the Morning Star and the National Newspaper League Company in the 1860s. In other cases, Law may be relying too much on his previously published work, which offers exploratory evidence of a suggestive rather than definitive nature. An example here is his recognition of the limitations of quantitative approaches: a little more investment in the size of the samples he uses for some of his tabulations would, in fact, have greatly enhanced their usefulness. In general, his narratives tend to be partial, identifying elements of novelty but giving insufficient attention to continuity, or asking specific ‘representative’ instances to do too much work. With regard to the former, as suggested above, his account of the shift from readers as active citizens to passive consumers elides the powerful continuities within the patterns he discusses — not least the enduring importance of readers’ letters and ‘replies to correspondents’ segments, and the extent to which the mass circulation periodicals of the later nineteenth century represent additional rather than transformed readerships. As for the latter, the case studies he uses to exemplify the three stages of nineteenth century newspaper publication, The Times, Dundee Advertiser and Daily Mail, and magazines, Blackwoods, Cornhill, and The Strand Magazine, while they effectively alert readers to important types of publication, neither adequately encompass the complexity of the wider histories nor bear the argumentative weight Law loads onto them.
In his brief concluding chapter noting that Dallas’s ideas failed to anticipate the late century developments of mass market capitalism, Law himself misses the opportunity to summarise his position on the nature of the nineteenth century ‘media revolution’. Ultimately, perhaps, the fundamental lessons to be learnt here are that Dallas tells us much about the mid-century (liberal) ideal, but less about the historical reality of its operation across the century; and that no single narrative can effectively capture the complex nature of the Victorian media revolution. Even so, there is much to be said for this ambitious book. It works effectively as an introductory conspectus of nineteenth century press and periodical history, introducing readers to many of the topic’s most significant and enduring debates, offering useful chronologies, tabulations and accounts of key developments, and also supplying effective examples which illuminate the richness and complexity of the field. Experts will find flashes of fresh insight and interesting lines of further thought; newcomers will emerge with a rich understanding of Victorian press and periodical history in all its heterogeneity and dynamism.
Links to Related Material
- Dallas on the Prediodical Press
- Dallas on the Principle of Anonymity
- Review of Dallas Liddle's The Dynamics of Genre: Journalism and the Practice of Literature in Mid-Victorian Britain
- Open Access Nineteenth-century Periodicals (a list of links to online sources)
Bibliography
[Book under review] Law, Graham. The Periodical Press Revolution. E.S. Dallas and the Nineteenth Century British Media System. Routledge Research in Journalism. London: Routledge, 2024. 190 pp. £108.00 hardback/£31.99 eBook. ISBN 9781032271019
Dallas, Eneas Sweetland. The Gay Science. Edited by Graham Law and Jenny Bourne Taylor, Ebook in PDF format published January 2024. URL: https://glaw.w.waseda.jp/ESD-GS/ESD-GS.pdf.
Created 23 October 2024